SSD's

[jj2414]

I finally have FSX running in a decent state. I have it on it's own HDD, just a standard mechanical 7200rpms.

What's your opinion on having FSX on a SSD? as far as load times and texture lag when switching views.

[Flyingdreamz]

I finally have FSX running in a decent state. I have it on it's own HDD, just a standard mechanical 7200rpms.

What's your opinion on having FSX on a SSD? as far as load times and texture lag when switching views.

having an SSD is only going to improve load times, I have no data to prove it yet. I have two copies of FSX one on a 7200RPM Drive and the other on a 64GB vertex 4. the SSD you see slightly faster load times but when the loading is done, there is no change, because of how DTX9 works it loads all of the textures in to the RAM on load. (when ever someone enters the server it loads the textures for that aircraft). Pretty much if you want to get faster texture switching, get faster RAM. Also having a faster GPU would help too. An SSD is really good for your OS or programs like Office, or Photoshop because you get faster load times. Normally you load times are dictated on your transfer rate and/or read speed.

[jj2414]

I have a GTX670 card so I don't think I need a faster one. FSX doesn't even uses half it's power to run. The slow ac texture loading after changing camera views is bloody annoying, that's outside of mutiplayer so a server is not the issue. FSX is running on it's own 7200 HDD.

[Flyingdreamz]

Right, but what is your RAM Speed, DDR2, DDR400, DDR3, what MHz is it. like I said above, its all about the RAM.

[jj2414]

16GB of DDR3 RAM

[Flyingdreamz]

then you should be fine.

[Hippo]

One extra tip, just to help HDD folks... and this works particularly well if you have FSX on a dedicated HDD... download a good free Defrag program like DeFraggler and set it to "defrag free space". It will move all of the data on the drive up to the "front" of the drive... the fastest part. For HDDs, the first half of the drive is faster than the second half. Even if it shaves a few seconds off load times, that's worth it.

[Waterman981]

There are all sorts of interesting things to consider when buying spinning disks. I haven't gone SSD yet with my system, but am running 4 500 GB drives in RAID 10. The drives I bought are 500 GB per platter, so they had the highest platter density when I bought them. That means for each time the head is over the disk, there is more there to read, so it can read it faster. For spinning disk I'm happy.